Ocean Energy: Tide and Tidal Power
Product Description
Engineers dreams and fossil energy replacement schemes can come true. Man has been tapping the energy of the sea to provide power for his industries for centuries. Tidal energy combined with that of waves and marine winds rank among those most successfully put the work. Large scale plants are capital intensive but smaller ones, particularly built in China, have proven profitable. Since the initiation of the St Malo project in France, similar projects have gone into … More >>
Having spent some time with this book in a bookstore, I’m sorry to report that this is another example of the severe decline — or even abdication — of editing in some divisions of Springer. Most of the illustrations in this book look like they were made from photocopies of old newsprint. A 2008 update is in an appendix, with chapter-by-chapter emendations. Another appendix includes a roughly 2-page abstract of the book presented in 11 languages; I was curious to see that these include Romanian, even though I don’t recall Romania having a coastline comparable to Japan’s, China’s or Brazil’s, all of whose languages are omitted.
A more serious issue is that there are six different bibliographies at the end of the book, which are not integrated with each other. The principles for inclusion in one list but not another are not clear, other than that some appear to be age-based sediments (pre-1982, 1982-1992, 1992-2007) — perhaps this is an hommage to oceanic processes, but it’s not necessarily a useful conceit in a book of this type. Sometimes the title of the article is listed, but a long list of “additional references” just includes first authors’ names and journal citations. If these lists are indeed meant to be comprehensive bibliographies of the field, it’s pretty useless not to have titles to tell you what the article is about. Even worse, these lists aren’t complete even when it comes to sources cited in the book itself. Use Amazon’s search feature to search on “Setoguchi,” and you’ll discover that some refecences cited in footnotes make it into the back matter, while others don’t. Worst of all, I spent several minutes in vain trying to find information about the cryptically-cited “Kaneko 2004″ (cited @126), but there isn’t any, anywhere (once again, you can share my frustration by searching on “Kaneko” with Amazon’s search tool).
This book gives the impression of the authors having handed over a file folder of miscellaneous materials, accumulated or prepared over the years, and the publisher presenting it more or less as-is. In recent years, I have been finding a trend toward negative corellation between the price and editorial quality of Springer books (except perhaps their mathematics series). Amazon’s search feature makes it difficult to examine the back matter on which this book relies. I can’t say that the content of the book is useless, but please look closely at a hard copy before you spring for the hefty price.
Rating: 3 / 5